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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

I bought the founder's edition Stadia hardware and I'm thrilled with what I got out of it, personally. I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds. Played several AAA games I had no access to otherwise. Still going to have the, now free, Chromecast Ultra 4k with ethernet cable power adapter afterward too. It works fine even if I don't pair Stadia controllers with it.

This Ubisoft initiative to transfer licenses to PC is actually worthless to me since my PC doesn't have a GPU capable of playing games anyway and I have no intention to buy one.

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Considering more people are reading these headlines than experiencing a round of google freebies for their shutdown, this is only going to work to limit consumer buy-in on whatever google decides it needs to do next.

Google is panically trying to find another unicorn, as it knows its current cash cow, ads, is holding almost all its eggs and could be facing its demise as online regulation only continues to strengthen.

Not to mention google’s perverse promotional incentives that ignore supporting products long term, focusing on launching new things instead.

Google, as it is right now, is a dying company. They need basically a complete overhaul, starting with firing the entire C-level, especially the true CEO, Ruth Porat.

As an aside about GPUs, things have changed a lot over the years. In the early 2000s games were being released that were impossible to run on high settings with current hardware, and your hardware was outdated after 3 months and obsolete after a year.

Today An RX580 (released in 2017) can be had for $100-$200 and is enough to comfortably run any modern game at quite nice settings. It's been a while since I looked as well, it's entirely possible the Ethereum swap is pushing card prices down even lower.

You only need the silly priced cards if you want to do something like play games on maxed out settings in 4k at a locked 120fps.

But consider the cost of power. For many people, especially Europeans, the power bill from running a gaming PC might be substantially higher than that of running a laptop + Stadia or GeForce Now monthly subscription.

Which indicates that something is wrong with the residential electricity markets. Google should not be paying substantially less for marginal electricity than Google’s customers.

(This is a major problem with California’s energy planning. On the one hand, CA (IMO fairly sensibly) wants users to switch from gas to electricity. On the other hand, CA’s electricity prices are so egregiously inflated that people have an economic incentive to switch from electricity to gas.)

> Which indicates that something is wrong with the residential electricity markets. Google should not be paying substantially less for marginal electricity than Google’s customers.

In a more perfect world, that would be the case!

Not at all. We want companies to leverage economies of scale. Efficiency should bring competitive advantage. Google often invests in datacenters in places based around where it's cheaper to power and run them, often owning the energy production.

This is a good thing

But of limited value for a service like Stadia. Power may be cheaper 1000 miles away, but those 1000 miles cost latency.

Often using subsidies and tax advantages so whether it's cheaper overall for society will depend on the cost of these venefits.

Google have some datacenters with dedicated renewable power generation (e.g. Belgium) they set up themselves, so it makes sense sometimes their electricity is cheaper.

I'm not sure about in Europe, but in the U.S. at least a substantial portion of power generation is already from renewables. That doesn't really make it free, or necessarily even cheaper depending on the circumstances.

It makes it cheaper for Google if they build it themselves for their DC than to buy at market rates such as they are today.

Running a mini pc like the Minisforum UM560/UM580 at full tilt is equivalent to running an incandescent light bulb.

> equivalent to running an incandescent light bulb.

...which we also no longer have, exactly because they consume too much electricity compared to LEDs.

Honestly if 60 watts is too much, I really hope you’re never getting in a car or on a plane for a holiday.

Your hope is validated! I'm one of the greenest, least energy-consuming people on Earth. I live next to a hydro plant with capacity to spare, don't eat meat, don't own a car, have no drivers license, never fly, and my last holiday I cycled 600km [1].

[1] https://hypertele.fi/fbd0998dd2834f08

500W average power draw while running a game

2h average a day playing games

40c/kWh for power

30 * 0.4 * 2 * 0.5 = 12 EUR/month

Stadia Pro was 10 EUR. So you're not wrong, though it's easily within the margin of error for this ballpark estimate (e.g. I wish I still had 14 hours a week for gaming; the power draw could be off by a factor of two in either direction, ...). And in winter, using power for computing is just a roundabout way of heating your living area, so in a way, it's free. I wonder if increased electricity costs were a factor in shutting down Stadia.

Their efforts should also allow you to transition to GeForce Now or other cloud gaming providers, so it's definitely not worthless.

I got a free game system for years since they are giving everyone refunds.

This will be a common attitude in the future as far as Google's consumer products go. People will buy them expecting them to shut down in a few years, but now they'll also expect a refund.

If you're a Googler who dreams of heading up a project to make something consumer-facing it'll be a lot harder to get buy-in from the board now that it'll cost so much more to shut it down (in dollars if a refund is given or in good will if it isn't) anything that's not a massive success.

Keeping services stable on life support is a muscle Google needs to build if they want to be relied on. Maybe that will happen when there’s an overt price tag on neglecting it.

I'll echo your sentiment. I got to game free for nearly three years and I get to keep any hardware I purchased to do so. I personally grew tired of Stadia due to the lack of public support and negative sentiment any time it was brought up so I'm happy to be getting my money back (especially seeing as some games are providing second licenses on top of refunds) which can go towards a GPU while being given time to finish any games in the coming months.

> they are giving everyone refunds

Not the developers who poured millions into porting games.

Few developers ported to Stadia out of good will, Google paid very handsomely up front.

Yeah, this. My previous company got paid a lot of money to bring our titles to Stadia. And it wasn't worth it, as Google kept changing APIs and interfaces. And then nobody played the game. It didn't happen again, and basically everyone in this industry has been using Stadia as a punchline for years.

Not the developers who google poured millions into to have them port games to stadia.

Porting games? Isn't it essentially and RDP connection?

Nope, it ran on specific hardware and needed specific compilation. It definitely wasn't free to support.

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